Swarm of Rats

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"'The rat,' said O'Brien, still addressing his invisible audience, 'although a rodent, is carnivorous. You are aware of that. You will have heard of the things that happen in the poor quarters of this town. In some streets a woman dare not leave her baby alone in the house, even for five minutes. The rats are certain to attack it. Within quite a small time they will strip it to the bones. They also attack sick or dying people. They show astonishing intelligence in knowing when a human being is helpless.'"

Rats and mice are perfect for the "huge swarm" treatment, since, as any exterminator will tell you, they tend to breed a lot. And really fast. Also, as omnivores, they can and will eat meat — sometimes even if said meat is still alive — and rats in particular have strong enough teeth to chew through metal.

Examples:

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Anime & Manga

Played for Laughs in the second Ranma ˝ movie (Nihao My Concubine). The antagonist unleashes a load of rats to scare all the girls; of course Ranma gets all superior about this, saying she isn't scared of little furry animals. The rats are then pursued by a herd of cats (which are Ranma's Weaksauce Weakness). Hilarity Ensues.

In the AKIRA manga, after Akira causes the destruction of Tokyo upon reawakening, there's one scene where Chiyoko is waist deep in a pool of water underground and swarms of starving rats swim to her trying to eat her.

In one episode of Sailor Moon, Zoisite follows Luna and a cat named Rhett Butler (Hercules in the DIC dub) into the sewer. Worn out by the chase, he places his hand on the wall... only to realize it's moving. What follows stirs up a literal wave of rats that is shown swallowing him up at one point.

O whan she saw him, Young Bekie, Her heart was wondrous sair! For the mice but an the bold rottons Had eaten his yallow hair.

In Robert Southey's ballad "God's Judgment on a Wicked Bishop", (1799, based on a 14th century legend) the evil Bishop Hatto is eaten alive by a giant army of rats.

They have whetted their teeth against the stones, And now they pick the Bishop's bones: They gnaw'd the flesh from every limb, For they were sent to do judgment on him!

Comic Books

In Countdown to Final Crisis, Una is eaten alive by a swarm of mutated rats, and shows her Determinator street cred by continuing to fight them long enough to will her flight ring to another character, who escapes.

The Shooting Star has Tintin hugging a lamppost to escape rats swarming through the streets.

In one issue of The Phantom, set in Victorian London, this is the fate of the Jack the Ripper inspired villain Hack Jack, who gets trapped in the sewers while fleeing the current Phantom, and is devoured by a horde of rats. His remains aren't found until weeks later.

In Drowntown, Leo gets mobbed by rats, and since they're escaped genetic experiments with human-level intelligence, they're able to tie him up. They have something of a grudge against him, but he's able to talk them into letting it slide and doing some work for him. (Their king says that they're sparing him because he's the only creature lower than they are.)

During the Batman: No Man's Landcrossover event over in Robin Tim found himself dealing with swarms of rats directed by the Ratcatcher in Gotham's sewers while evading other villains like Freeze while looking for a rumored underground cache of foodstuffs. The rats manage to get in a few bites and Tim falls in the sewage which means he spends a while ill afterwards.

Comic Strips

Dick Tracy villain Dr. Mordred is eaten by rats in the last storyline written by Dick Locher, having planned that fate for Tracy himself.

Fan Works

Thousand Shinji: A swarm of sick, diseased, ferocious old rats lives in Rei's apartment. They act as a very effective deterrent to trespassers.

Sherlock Gnomes: When their boat is stranded by the falling water level in the sewer, Sherlock and Watson start using ropes to haul the boat off the floor of the tunnel. Gnomeo and Juliet are confused as to why, but quickly learn it is to get the boat (and them) out of the way of the swarm of rats that is approaching.

Similarly in From Russia with Love, after the explosion in the Russian embassy, Bond and Tatania's escape route in the underground reservoir is diverted by a swarm of rats.

In the movie El Norte, the brother and sister sneaking over the Mexican border crawl through a sewer line at one point and are nearly eaten alive by a swarm of rats. They survive, but the sister contracts a disease from a rat bite and dies later.

Willard, after the title character befriends the rats in his basement and trains them so he can exact revenge on his boss. In the 2003 movie, the swarm of rats even consume a live cat.

Titanic (1997) had a non-threatening example. Some of the Third Class passengers decided the best way to find their way abovedecks was to follow the swarm of fleeing rats.

Tommy Ryan: If this is the direction the rats are going that's fine with me!

In Wild Beasts, a horde of PCP-crazed rats ascend from the sewers and kill a couple making out in their car. They prove to be so bad that the officials have to deal with them with a flamethrower.

Ladder 49 had this. It wasn't a swarm, though...more of a sea, really...

Warrior Cats: Rats serve as antagonists numerous times throughout the books, always attacking in huge swarms.

Bluestar loses one of her lives to a horde of rats in the first book.

In the Super Editions Firestar's Quest and SkyClan's Destiny, a huge Hive Minded swarm of rats serves as a major antagonist. There are so many that when one character tells Firestar "you can't see the ground for all the rats", Firestar thinks he's exaggerating, but realizes when he goes to fight the rats himself that the cat was right.

In Crookedstar's Promise, a swarm of rats attacks a RiverClan patrol in a barn, killing Hailstar.

Yellowfang's Secret has ShadowClan facing off against swarms of rats (one of their primary food sources) twice. The second time, Foxheart is killed by two rats who jump on her as if they were trained.

In The Jungle, Stanislovas is eaten by rats after being locked in the lard factory he works in at night.

The short story "The Burial of the Rats" by Bram Stoker features a character recounting a tale where a bunch of hungry rats had cleaned a corpse clean from flesh, leaving only bones behind.

Subverted in "The Pit and the Pendulum" by Edgar Allan Poe. The rats don't injure the hero (much, and anyway, what's a few rat bites when there's a heavy, razor-sharp pendulum about to cut you in two?), and in fact he uses them to escape his bonds.

The H.P. Lovecraft story "The Rats in the Walls" has this occur in the backstory, where a huge swarm of rats came flowing out of the ruins of the De la Peur estate sometime after they had been massacred by their son, killing both livestock and people. They came from the caverns underneath the estate, having already devoured all of the De La Peurs human "cattle"

In Anita Blake Vampire Hunter, you have the rodere, groups of giant wererats. As if that wasn't frightening enough, they can call regular rats to an extent to horde around them, and so can some vampires.

In Straight Silver, Gaunt and a team of infiltrators are sneaking through an abandoned siege tunnel when an artillery bombardment starts. This sends a horde of rats straight through the team. While no one died, they still bemoaned their situation and all of them were bit multiple times.

A novel-only sequel to Warriors of Virtue had Tsun return to her home, an underground Lifespring facing a nasty rat infestation. Several times, she has to deal with the rodents being so thickly packed on the ground that there's hardly any place to step, and reacts to being bitten at least once.

In The Runelords, at one point the One True Master of Evil unleashes a horde of plague rats against human villages.

In The Bone Collector, one of the victims is chained to a sewer pipe and left to be eaten by rats. Lincoln chews out his assistant for shooting one the rats off of the victim and thereby contaminating the crime scene.

In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a swarm of friendly rats help get the Cowardly Lion away from a field of sleep-inducing poppies. This would have been too difficult to replicate in the 1939 film version of course.

In Valerie Martin's novel A Recent Martyr, the main character, Emma, is on an outing to a public park near the river when she sees an army of dying rats being cleaned up (i.e., hidden) by city workers. This is foreshadowing for the epidemic of bubonic plague that occurs later in the story.

In the novel Metro 2033 Artyom's backstory includes him losing his mother at the age of five when the station they were living in was overrun by a horde of rats. Artyom only survived because his mother gave him to one of the three men who managed to escape after begging him to save him.

In The Lotus War novel Stormdancer, the Royal Huntmaster calls up a swarm of rats in fight.

Horror writer James Herbert made his name with debut novel The Rats, where London's rat population mutates into an intelligent hive-mind, grows to monstrous size, develops a taste for human flesh, and can transmit a terrible new plague into the bargain. London is soon taken over and the war of humans versus rats begins. The Rats spawned several sequels and plays on the oft-repeated assertion that in London you are never more than twenty feet away from a rat.

Stephen Gilbert's Ratman's Notebooks involves a reclusive young man who trains an army of rats to do his bidding. Adapted into two different films called Willard.

In the last Farthing Wood book, White Deer Park is colonized by rats. The initial settlers soon become a horde that threatens even the larger carnivores. Several characters are bitten to death by swarms of rats.

In Revelation Space, the Lighthugger Nostalgia for Infinity has janitor rats, bioengineered rodents that the ship uses for cleaning. After the ship gets taken over by Sun Stealer, he uses the ship's control over the rats to make a swarm that attacks the crew.

Averted in Redwall: While outnumbering the enemy is the most common strategy among villains, it's hardly limited to rats, and no mammalian species seems to follow the Explosive Breeder route, having children one at a time instead.

Live-Action TV

Little House on the Prairie: The first season episode "Plague," where a swarm of rats has infected sacks of meal meant for human consumption, causing several of the townsfolk to fall seriously ill (some even die) with typhus.

1000 Ways to Die had a man killed by rats that had gnawed through his face and head into his brain.

In one episode of Survivorman, Les Stroud is stranded on a tropical island that is utterly overrun with hordes of ship rats, against which Stroud has to build a shelter. Of course, this being Survivorman, he also ends up eating several of the rats.

In a rare friendly example of a Swarm of Rats, an episode of Hoarders featured a man who'd let his one male and two female pet rats escape from their cage, then didn't have the heart to stop feeding the resulting horde of offspring. By the time help arrived, he'd been forced out of his own house, which was completely overrun by more than 3000 drywall-gnawing, furniture-destroying rodents. Luckily, animal rescue shelters from all over the state were able to mobilize one of the biggest hoarding-recovery operations of all time, and all but a few severely-injured animals were shipped out to rat-lovers statewide.

An episode of Grimm featured a creature called a reinigen — essentially a rat-man — that could summon Swarm of Rats to do his bidding. He was nearly framed for the death of a music teacher.

Dollhouse. At the start of Season 2, a pissed-off Dr Saunders puts lab rats in Topher's cupboard, in a not-too-subtle message of what she thinks of him. His female assistant Ivy has to retrieve them while Topher climbs the nearest railing to get away.

The 1937 short story "Three Skeleton Key", by George G. Toudouze, was adapted several times for the radio anthology series Escape and Suspense. Vincent Price starred in two of these adaptations. The story features three French lighthouse keepers who are trapped in their tower by a starving horde of rats.

In the BBC's "Dick Barton - Special Agent" (a 1972 re-recording of the lost original serial "Dick Barton and the Secret Weapon"), the heroes are lured into a room by the villain, who traps them there with a pack of bloodthirsty rats.

In Stephen Gallagher's "The Last Rose of Summer", a 1977 science fiction production for Manchester's Picadilly Radio, the protagonist is attacked by rats in the dark buried streets below a future city.

Tabletop Games

Warhammer: Skaven Packmasters breed and command swarms of rats, and their Grey Seers even have spells that summon them.

Dungeons & Dragons has rules and stats for swarms of rats, including some exotic types such as skeletal rat swarms, corpse rat swarms, spectral swarms (incorporeal undead that typically result from careless fireball-flinging adventurers inflicting large amounts of collateral damage on the local rat population), cranium rat swarms (psychic rats!) that become more intelligent as more gather together, and moonrats (rats that become more or less intelligent depending on the phases of the moon). It is also part of the powers of a vampire to summon lower creatures, including swarm of rats. The Tamer of Beasts prestige class, from the book Masters of the Wild, has similar powers and is depicted in the artwork as controlling a massive army of rats.

Paranoia adventure Send in the Clones. One of the many threats the Troubleshooters will face in Sewerworld is swarms of hungry, mean, housecat-sized rats. They rush out of the darkness and attack the PCs.

Dominion: The "Rats" card has the effect of trashing one of your other cards and replacing it with a Rats card. If you're not careful, they can clog your deck and reduce your chances of drawing something more useful.

Planescape: Torment has cranium rats, which are rats that share a Hive Mind with other cranium rats in close proximity and get smarter in higher numbers. With enough of them, they are capable of human (or superhuman) intelligence and even spellcasting if enough of them gather in one place - several areas of the game feature a Zerg Rush of rats coming at the player character, tossing balls of lightning. There is even a huge collection of cranium rats that form a mysterious being known as Many-As-One, who acts as somewhat of a king of a rat kingdom.

Swarms of rats are a common enemy in Dishonored, also being the carriers of a terrible plague that's gripping the game's setting. The protagonist can weaponize rats as well, by magically summoning them to either attack the enemy or to make a quick escape by possessing one of them while the others deal with enemies. The number of rat swarms you encounter is directly proportional to how many people you kill in the game, since corpses attract rats.

In South Park: The Stick of Truth, one of Princess Kenny's abilities is Swarm of Rats, in which he summons a huge wave of rats to sic at his enemies (though it can backfire if he fails the prompt, causing them to devour him). Similarly, if he's defeated in combat, rats come by to rip his corpse apart, preventing him from being revived until two turns, after which he comes back by himself.

The protagonist of Layers of Fear believes that his house is infested with rats. No one else can see them.

In Dwarf Fortress, rats are a common vermin that devour your food, bone and shell stockpiles, give dwarves unhappy thoughts, and spontaneously appear in large swarms.

One of these serves as a boss during a dungeon escape in Lunarosse. They're even more of a threat due to magic enhancement, but it leaves them Weakened by the Light.

In a 2011 arc of Mindmistress, Forethought is trapped in the backfire of time manipulation device, leaving him moving at a sixtieth of normal speed. At one point, an agent sent to check on him finds rats about to feast upon his apparently no-longer moving body. Imagine a swarm of rats moving sixty times faster than in real life and coming at you...

The Order of the Stick: The Mechane airship happens to have a sizable rat population, since when a vampire uses his "Children of the Night" power inside, it summons a swarm of rodents big enough to overwhelm the Order's animal companions.

While young ursipedes in Here There Be Monsters are not actually rats they're about the same size, and when Victor accidentally steps through the covering to a nest full of them their swarming out of it and up his leg invoke a swarm of rats quite well.

Web Original

The Onion's "world history" book has "Corpse-eating rats become greatest power in Europe" during the World War I newspaper headlines.

There's an hypothetical question around the internet. "Pick two. They will defend you. The rest is coming to kill you."◊. Among your options are 50 eagles, 10 crocodiles, 3 bears, 7 bulls, 1 human with a rifle, 15 wolves, 5 gorillas, 4 lions... and 10000 rats. Naturally, the rats tend to be a top option because of this trope.

Web Video

Tier Zoo episode "The Optimal Team Composition", which discusses the "Pick Two. They will defend you. The rest is coming to kill you." question◊. One of the choices is 10000 rats. Tier Zoo explains that they're pretty much the top choice to pick, since you will be overrun if they aren't picked, while if picked the entire Zerg Rush is very capable of taking down all the other animals on the list via Death of a Thousand Cuts with the possible exception of the flight-capable eagles not that it matters since the eagles are the other top choice. Of note, picking the rats and eagles means that you have 200+ rats against every other animal — which is considered overkill, even against a bear or crocodile.

Happens in the "Planet Radio" episode of Superjail!, where a rat eats the vocal chords of an inmate and starts to talk and rule over other rats.

Used horrifyingly in the Batman: The Brave and the Bold episode "Gorillas in Our Midst", in which The Spectre turns a supervillain into cheese — but leaves him alive and conscious — and then releases a swarm of mutant rats to eat him alive.

Also happens in "Homer's Enemy" after the derelict factory Bart bought for $1 collapses overnight, and Bart wonders where all the rats will go. Cue a massive horde of rats swarming out of the wreckage... and right into Moe's Tavern.

The BBC reported a similar plague of rats in India during 2007, details.

There have been increased reports of rats swarming elderly people at nursing homes who are too weak to fend them off.

Taft, California was invaded by millions of mice in late 1926.

The infamous bubonic plague or "black death" was believed to have been caused by the rat population in Europe. Since the rats carried fleas which in turn carried Yersinia pestis.

Rats frequently make their home near fast food restaurants in urban areas. They generally stay there because the restaurants either have poor pest control or the customers leave their litter around for rats to carry off.

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